


Tom Walker and the Devil

by BritishAssistant



Category: Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett, The Devil and Tom Walker - Washington Irving
Genre: America, Banter, But when is he not?, Colonialism, Crossover, Crowley POV, Crowley’s a bit of a bastard in this, Discussions of the Human Soul, Dramatics, Early America, Early Arrangement, Gen, Holy Water, Human Capacity fo Good and Evil, Morality, New World, POV Second Person, with wine
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-06
Updated: 2019-06-06
Packaged: 2020-04-11 16:18:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,974
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19113298
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BritishAssistant/pseuds/BritishAssistant
Summary: A quick crossover fanfic that I once submitted for an English assignment. Watching the new episodes of Good Omens reminded me that it existed, and I decided to post it here for you guys as well!





	Tom Walker and the Devil

S’funny. Even after the whole business with the apple in Eden, even after Sodom ‘n Gomorrah and Herod and the Crusades and the entirety of the fourteenth century, the human capacity for willful blindness still amazes me. 

Hm? Oh, don’t start on their supposed “capacity for goodness and optimism” again, angel. Look—look, don’t you dare start going off about the “ineffability of His plan” or I’m taking the wine and finding somewhere else to have a nice drink. What? Oh, so it’s _proof_ you want, eh? Well, I was in the New World recently, and you wouldn’t believe the rate at which humans made deals with me, then tried to weasel out of them once they got cold feet!

Names? Well…there was Deacon Peabody, Absalom Crownshield… oh, and then there was Tom Walker. He was a riot, Tom was. The others, they at least had a reason for making deals with me; Deacon thought he was ensuring that his offspring would continue to live comfortably and have plenty of influence by swindling the natives out of their land, and Absalom became a buccaneer and displayed great riches to impress the mousy daughter of a fishmonger. Tom was only ever interested in how much money he had in his own pocket, a proper miser through and through! He never spent any money on firewood, nor on repairs for his shack, not even of food for his horse! …Yes angel, but the horse died eventually, so at least it wasn’t suffering very long. The only woman to ever marry him was just as miserly as he, and she had a fearsome temper! Attacked anyone who vexed her with fingernails and teeth and— …yes, angel that is how I got these scratches. Stop sniggering.

 _Any_ way, going back to Tom Walker—I thought I’d told you to _stop sniggering_. _Thank_ you. Where was I? Oh, right. I met Tom Walker when he decided to stray from the path, if you’ll pardon the pun, and managed to stumble into my neck of the woods where I was sheltering in an old fort the natives had abandoned. No it wasn’t very comfortable, I was miserable and wet half the time, but it had _atmosphere_ , you see? Dark, dangerous, inconveniently hard to reach, really lets people _know_ what they’re dealing with, doesn’t it? I even went through the trouble of starting a few rumors about it being a sacrificial alter to demonic spirits. So old Tom sits down to catch his breath, and he manages to unearth a skull which he then kicks. Taking that as my cue, _I_ appear, with my axe and half-native garb and dark skin all covered with soot and—what? No, I don’t know why I was covered in soot. It’s based off of what scares him, remember? Maybe he was scared of blacksmiths, or an honest day’s work. Anyway, we get to talking, and I show him this new system for remembering my victims that I created; I carve their names into a tree, the interior of which rots in accordance to how rotten their souls are, and I count down the days until I can collect them by hitting each tree with my axe until they die and the tree falls down. What? Oh, what d’you mean “poor, innocent trees?” Trees aren’t capable of moral action, let alone innocence or guilt! No, look—look, forget about the trees for a second, and let me carry on with my story, will you?!

Where was I…so I show him my remembering system ( _not one_ word _about trees if you want to keep those feathers_ ) give him the sales banter about how I’m responsible for all human evils, blah de blah de blah, and he guesses that I’m “Old Scratch” as they call my lot over there. We get to talking, and I mention that I know where the treasure of the pirate Kidd is buried and that only those in my favor can get at it—complete lies of course, anyone could get at the stuff, though there’s not much left to get at now—and Tom begins _salivating_. I mean, drool dripping down his chin and everything, the entire works. Of course he clams up a bit when I mention the conditions of the bargain being selling his soul. Of course, I’d sort of expected that; he’s a miser, and misers never want to give away anything that they perceive as having value to other people, even if they don’t value it themselves. No—no he didn’t angel, otherwise why would his soul be in poor enough condition for me to take an interest in the first place? Haven’t got an answer for that one, have you? Thought not. I tell him to go home and think on it for a few days and I brand him with my thumb as a sign of good faith and partly because it heightens the experience. No, he didn’t feel a thing, and besides it’s not like your lot are any _less_ dramatic.

So I wait. The next day, to my surprise, a grouchy woman comes along at about twilight and demands that I give her the same deal I gave her husband. No, I wasn’t happy. What d’you mean why?! Because I’m meant to choose souls that will cause the most collateral generation of evil! Take Deacon Peabody for instance. He swindles those natives off of their land. Those natives then have to go find somewhere else to live. They don’t trust settlers anymore, so they may attack any lone merchants that they come across. That merchant, if he isn’t dead, is likely to be more surly and rude to his coworkers and distrusts the natives more than ever, so he drives harder bargains when dealing with them. And the cycle continues on and on until low-level evil accumulates into something _really_ horrifying. Like Salem. Now, this only works if someone in a position of relative influence is able to do something that effects a group on a wide scale, and I ask you, what kind of influence does a _housewife_ have in this day and age? Absolutely _none_. Forming a contract to get her soul when it’s obviously going down there _anyway_ would be a complete _waste_. So I decide to mess with her a bit, and tell her that if she wants to make a deal with me she has to bring me every portable thing she considers valuable in her house. Of course, she looks very put out about that, but she goes home and comes back the next evening with her apron laden with the stuff. I tell her to take it off and give it to me, which she does unwillingly. Then I go “see ya!” and start running. You should’ve seen her face!! It was _hilarious_. Practically _priceless_ … yeah, it stopped being funny when she sprung on me like a mountain lion and began clawing my face off. I didn’t even know what was going on at first. One moment she was standing there, the next she was mauling me! So I throw her off of me, but I didn’t really look where I was throwing, and she ended up sort of impaled…well, more like split in half by one of the trees’ branches. Oh, don’t give me that look! It was an accident and you know it! Why did the trees even have branches like that—obviously they need to look intimidating! Have you ever tried to make a _tree_  look scary? It’s next to impossible! You’ve got to make the trunk all gnarled and knotty and the branches look like they’re curling down to grasp you! And—fine, I’ll get on with it. Well, since the body was just _there_ and not really doing anything so I, uh, took its organs, and wrapped them up in her apron, and left them for Tom to find. His scream was pretty hilarious too, now that I think about it.

So a few evenings later, Tom comes back and agrees to the deal. We haggled a bit, him refusing to be a slave trader no matter what, funnily enough. Eventually we settled on him being a usurer, which he was very eager to start with. He started out small, creating a good reputation for himself and began to drive people to bankruptcy during a recession. The poorer the person, the harder his terms, and he was soon able to afford himself a fine house and carriage with horses to pull it. Of course, he let the house and carriage fall into disrepair because he was too lazy to pay for its upkeep. The horses starved, like usual. I, for my part, was just hanging around, waiting for the perfect moment to strike down the tree with his name on it. I made some deals with other mortals, even getting this minister to leave his congregation to become a slaver with the excuse that pagan peoples deserved a life of servitude to Christian masters. But none of them were ever as entertaining as Tom. He got _extremely_ paranoid about me collecting my due. To try and trick me out of it, he became an avid churchgoer, praying louder than the pious, carrying around a small bible in his coat and keeping a huge one on his desk in his counting house. You should’ve seen that thing. It was bigger than a _whole_ human baby. I measured.

Anyway, one afternoon during the dog days of summer, Tom was doing what he did best—turning away some poor sot who had made the mistake of borrowing money from him. But what sets this speculator apart from the others is that he’s persistent, and he eventually frustrates Tom to the point where Tom exclaims “The Devil take me if I ever made a farthing!” Those, of course are the words I was waiting to hear. I appear with a pitch black horse, and tell him in my deepest voice that he’s come for. He goes really pale, and his eyes bulge like a toad’s stomach, but there’s nothing he can do because his two bibles are upstairs and well away from me. I fling him onto the horse and set it galloping down the street at such a pace that his clerks have to stick their pens in their ears to dull the noise of hooves. The horse took Tom out of the town, back into the woods where he first met me, and bucked him off into a ravine that was the resting place of what remained of Kidd’s treasure. He broke his neck, and his body was never found, as a thunderbolt set the entire forest ablaze that night. When the trustees tried to take charge of his property, nothing was found except cinders and wood shavings. In his stable there were skeletons instead of horses and his great house also burned down. Such was the end of Tom Walker.

Hm? Oh, what d’you mean, this wouldn’t have happened but for me? Look, he and his wife were going down there _anyway_ because of how miserly they were. All I did was provide him an opportunity to tap into his greater potential for evil. Even then, he took his job to extremes that my suggestions barely covered. If he’d wanted to, he could have just lent out money at a reasonable rate, since all usurers, good _or_ bad, belong to my lot. He was the one who delighted in driving others to bankruptcy, _willingly and knowingly_. Sooner or later your people are going to have to open their eyes and see that maybe the Father’s precious little creations really aren’t so perfect after al—! W-wait, h-hold on a minute, angel, b-be reasonable and _put the bloody holy water down—!_


End file.
